


A Forty-Foot Dive (Into a Tub of Water)

by stillscape



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-11
Updated: 2015-01-11
Packaged: 2018-03-07 01:24:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3155660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillscape/pseuds/stillscape
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Partridge decided to give Ben a key to the city right after he took the assistant city manager job? What if Chris sent Leslie along for moral support? What if Cindy Eckert was divorced? An AU starting at the end of "Fancy Party."  This was started for a trope bingo challenge, so...expect some tropes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Secrets

It took a lot to rattle Ann Perkins (best friend, beautiful nurse, and maker of amazing pancakes). The news that Leslie Knope (best friend, devoted civil servant, and consumer of amazing pancakes) had been secretly harboring mild feelings for the _other_ state budget auditor was enough to do it. 

On some reflection, the news that her ex-boyfriend had just gotten married was kind of throwing her, too. Donna had been right, Ann knew that—there was no point in being hung up on a guy you definitely didn’t want to marry—but yeah, it had been a weird evening to start with, and then Leslie had called with the news about Andy and April. Now Leslie was at her kitchen table, elbow-deep in maple syrup, with Ann chin-deep in feelings of guilt that it had taken an emergency midnight pancake party to realize she’d been so oblivious to her best friend’s emotional state of affairs. Which was, on the whole, less jarring but more important.

“I can’t believe I didn’t notice there was anything going on between you two.” She stared down at her own stack of pancakes, mostly untouched. “Leslie, why didn’t you say anything?” 

“Because I didn’t realize,” Leslie said. “I mean, I only sort of realized. Like, obviously I noticed that he’s cute, and he has a great butt, anyone would notice that—”

“Sure.” Ann hadn’t noticed that, but being supportive was often more important than rigorously adhering to the truth. “And you guys were working really well together by the end of the Harvest Festival.” 

Leslie nodded. “He worked _almost_ as hard on that as I did.” 

She could see how that might be a turn-on for Leslie. 

“And he’s really smart,” Leslie continued, “and he gets all my jokes and he compliments me a lot and I didn’t even _realize_ —I mean, I thought he was leaving after the Harvest Festival.”

“And you were too busy planning that to date anyone anyway.”

“Exactly.” Leslie took a deep breath. “So it’s not like it was much of a secret. I just didn’t let myself think about it at all. Maybe I was keeping it a secret from myself? No, that’s dumb.” 

“It’s not dumb,” Ann insisted. “It’s totally normal. But I still can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

“Ann, if I had known, I would have told you! I’m telling you now. Now my department is safe, and I have more time, and Ben’s staying in Pawnee. What do I do?” 

“Well, what do you _want_ to do?”

“I think,” said Leslie, slowly drawing her fork across a pool of maple syrup, “that I want to go out with him.” 

“So ask him out.” 

Leslie rolled her eyes at that—well, as much as she ever rolled her eyes. “Come on, Ann. Obviously I’m going to ask him out.” 

“Then why’d you ask me what to do?”

“I—Ann, tell me that if I ask him out and he says yes, the first date isn’t going to go badly.” 

Ann, who had picked up her coffee cup, paused before she took a sip, trying to remember certain details about the past few months—trying to think about Ben as a person in his own right, and not just as the state auditor who wasn’t Chris.

Considering how big of a project the Harvest Festival had been, she’d received very few ridiculous requests from Leslie. That wasn’t something she’d noticed at the time, but now it seemed glaringly obvious. Had Ben really been able to buffer that much of Leslie’s crazy?

Chris had bolted from Pawnee the moment their assignment had officially ended, but Ben had stayed through the bitter end of the Harvest Festival and beyond. He’d volunteered for cleanup crew—Ann remembered that now—and he’d come along on the camping trip and oh, god, he’d shown up at the hospital when Leslie had the flu. He’d shown up with _waffles_. 

And not that she knew Ben well, or really at all, but if he was the kind of person who valued dedication to the point of obsession, which she now thought he might be…

On the other hand, he was awfully good friends with Chris. Best friends, according to Chris. Ben had been invited on a number of double dates with them, though, and had declined all invitations. Maybe—she’d never given it a thought before—maybe that was because he was already interested in someone. Someone Chris wasn’t considering as a potential partner. She knew only too well that Chris placed a lot of emphasis on the consumption of dark leafy greens, and if that was part of his criteria, Leslie wouldn’t even be on the radar… 

Ann looked across the table at her best friend. More than anyone else she knew, Leslie deserved to have a guy that she thought was cute be super into her. 

“So you don’t need my advice,” she said. “It sounds like he’s super into you. And if he’s not, then he’s stupid. Because you’re awesome.” 

“Right.”

“Right. You’ve got this, Leslie.” 

“Right.” Leslie swallowed. “But what about—”

Ann shook her head, cutting Leslie off. “You’re done with being bad at first dates. That’s over. We killed it. Right?” 

“Right,” Leslie agreed, but she was staring off into space, and Ann could hear a note of uncertainty in her voice. 

“And you already know him pretty well, so it’s not like he’s going to turn out to be a crazy person.”

“True. God, Ann, you’re so smart. I know for sure Ben doesn’t have a motorcycle with a sidecar. And he doesn’t really care about teeth. At least, I don’t think he really cares about teeth.” 

“Okay then,” said Ann, with a firm nod. Right then and there, she made a silent vow to have Leslie’s back if Ben turned out to be a weirdo after all, or if he hurt her in a more normal way than Leslie usually got hurt. Leslie didn’t need to be protected, just supported, but damn it, she’d fight to the death for her best friend anyway. 

Leslie smoothed her napkin in her lap and sat up straighter. “Now, tell me again about all the guys you met tonight.” 

Truth be told, Ann wasn’t completely sure Leslie was over being bad at first dates. One successful first date with Justin might not have overridden the past twenty years or so. 

Not even Ann Perkins—best friend, beautiful poison dart frog, and loaner of perfect little black dresses for all occasions—not even Ann could have predicted the extent to which Leslie Knope might have a first date spiral out of control. 

She’d certainly never expected Leslie and Ben’s first date (or maybe it wasn’t a date; the circumstances were unclear) to end in a phone call from a Minnesota prison.


	2. Domesticity

Leslie licked her lips, squared her shoulders, and fell into lockstep with Ben. For all that he was taller than she was, and for all that he usually walked like he had somewhere important to be (she liked that, a lot), he was generally pretty easy to keep up with. 

Today his pace was a bit quicker than usual, making Leslie wish she’d worn a slightly more manageable heel. Sometimes marching speed was more important than getting that extra half-inch, and preparing to ask someone out was one of those times, if you were going to do it casually in a hallway without making a big deal about it because it wasn’t a big deal at all, really. Just two adults who liked each other’s company (definitely) and found each other attractive (she was pretty sure), deciding to take their friendship a step further (possibly). 

As soon as she got the words out, which she was doing. Right now. Casually. She hoped she looked casual. 

Ben shuffled to a stop in front of Councilman Howser’s office, and leaned against the doorframe. 

“Oh.” He sounded…not normal. “Um, I don’t think I can. But, uh, you’re great, and you have great ideas, and—” He opened the door and ducked inside. 

“Ben Wyatt!” called a familiar voice. Leslie wondered whether she ought to keep going down the hall, or not. “Ben, I was _literally_ just about to look for you. You and Leslie Knope. Have you seen her?” 

Well, that answered the question of whether or not she should keep going down the hall, she supposed. “I’m right here,” Leslie replied, hurrying into the room, just as Ben said “She’s right out there,” and hurried out of it. 

Naturally, they collided. “Ow,” they said, in unison, though Ben had at least remained upright. Leslie found herself on the floor, on her rear end, looking up at Councilman Howser, who nodded at her.

“Leslie.”

“Councilman.” 

It was Ben who offered her a hand, which she accepted. His palm was slightly, almost imperceptibly, sweaty against hers, and she wished she wasn’t noticing such minute details about Ben’s hand. Or wondering what they meant. What _did_ a very slightly sweaty palm mean? That he’d been thrown enough by her invitation to be nervous? That the hallway was warmer than usual? She already knew he didn’t have perpetually gross, sweaty palms, like Jerry did. 

Then she remembered that he’d just rejected her invitation, and she hastily scrambled to her own feet and pulled her hand back. There was nothing to read into anything. 

She kept reminding herself of that as Chris herded them out of Councilman Howser’s office and down the hallway to the city manager’s office, where he sat them in front of his desk, grinned broadly, and announced, “I am sending you two on a road trip!” 

“Great,” Leslie said, although it probably wasn’t. 

“Oh. Uh, no, I—” That was Ben, sounding suddenly and inexplicably panicked. He drew a deep breath. “Or actually, maybe it would—Chris, there’s something I need to talk to you about.” 

“It’s not the inter-governmental dating policy again, is it? I thought I made myself very clear.” 

_Inter-governmental dating policy?_

Leslie’s heart skipped a single beat, and she tried to side-eye Ben, in case turning her head to examine him for clues gave something away. She couldn’t see much, other than that his right knee was bouncing up and down. 

“Nope. No. You did. Very clear. It’s not that. It’s—I got an email from the city of Partridge.” 

Chris’s brow furrowed slightly. “Ben, they’re not trying to lure you back to Minnesota, are they?” 

“Good lord, no. I mean, not permanently.”

“Because I would be more than willing to write you _the_ most sparkling letter of recommendation, though of course I would be heartbroken if you decided to leave Pawnee now.” 

“I’m not leaving Pawnee,” Ben said. Now _he_ was giving _her_ the side-eye. “Partridge wants to give me a key to the city.” 

“Well, that is simply spectacular news!” Chris proclaimed, and he immediately strode around the side of the desk and enveloped Ben in an enormous, uncomfortable hug. Leslie thought it was good news too, but she said nothing. Yet. 

Ben shook his head, though. “I don’t think so. I mean, I think it’s probably a joke. I’m not going to accept.”

“But you have to accept.” That was Leslie’s voice, though she hadn’t meant to speak. A key to the city, though? She had her own key-to-the-city ceremony (when it came) completely planned and ready in a bright blue binder under her bed, where it had been waiting for years, fat with updates. “It’s a huge honor, right?” 

“Well, it doesn’t make any sense,” he muttered, as Chris finally released the hug. “Not now. Or ever, really.” 

Chris perched on the front edge of the desk. “You told me once that all the former mayors of Partridge have received a key to the city, except you. It seems to me that they are simply remedying an oversight.”

“It’s not an _oversight_ ,” Ben spat. “None of the other former mayors of Partridge bankrupted the city, either.”

“You know what I always say: time and white blood cells heal all wounds.”

Ben shook his head. “White blood cells don’t really apply here, Chris.” 

Chris, of course, ignored this. “When is the ceremony supposed to take place?”

“Next weekend. So I would basically have to leave right away, if I’m driving.” 

“That’s excellent timing,” Chris said. “I was going to send to you Indianapolis next Monday, both of you—” he pointed at Ben with one hand and Leslie with the other—“to pitch Pawnee as the host city for next year’s state Little League championships. This way, Ben can go to Minnesota for the weekend and stop in Indy on the way back, and you, Leslie, can meet him there.” 

“Great,” she said, turning to give Ben her best professional co-worker smile. “And you can show me the key when we see each other!” It _would_ be great, she thought. If Ben really, truly didn’t want to date her, then a tough project would be just the thing to reorient her…well, no, that wasn’t quite the truth. If Ben was, or had been, super into her (as Ann had put it), then his feelings had developed while organizing the Harvest Festival. So a tough project would be just the thing to reignite them. Right? Right. 

Mentally, Leslie added a pitch for the girls’ softball state championship as well. She wasn’t sure yet if they needed to be pitched at the same time, if the girls’ tournament was separate-but-equal or not—but Little League in itself might not be a big enough project. If girls’ softball happened at the same time, she’d be prepared, and if it wasn’t, she’d be prepared with a rebuttal as to why it should be taken every bit as seriously as the baseball tournament was. Either way, it would enrich her planning experience. 

Ben, his shoulders rapidly sagging, was now running a hand through his hair and muttering increasingly feeble protests. But the matter seemed settled, and Leslie returned to her office with a box of Little League materials, determined to get through a first draft of her proposal—well, really, _their_ proposal—before she went home that evening. 

It took a little longer than she thought, possibly because in addition to several pages of proposal, she also wrote several pages of emails to Ann, who was working a twelve-hour shift and couldn’t answer her. Several _dozen_ pages of emails to Ann. And she might also have written Ann several dozen text messages, mostly to ask what Ann knew about inter-governmental dating; whether Chris had ever mentioned it during their relationship. And she might have spent the first few hours glancing up so often to see if Ben was coming to work with her on Little League plans that April accused her of being a “weird bobblehead doll.”

But once the office cleared out after 5:00, and she was alone, it was much easier to focus. She was still at her desk at 6:30 when she heard a tap on the open glass door and looked up to see Ben, eyebrows raised, holding up a takeout container from JJ’s like it was a peace offering for a fight they weren’t having. 

“I thought you couldn’t do dinner tonight,” she said, trying not to smile _too_ broadly. 

Ben didn’t respond, at least not right away. They sat at the little round table in the main office, close enough to touch, but decidedly not touching. Leslie bit into her waffle, but Ben, who hadn’t even opened his own Styrofoam box, placed his hands flat on the table and caught her gaze.

“There’s a rule,” he said, “which exists in all local governments, including Pawnee’s, about government employees dating.” 

He didn’t break his eye contact with her. His gaze was steady, certain, but he didn’t look entirely happy…though it was possible she only _hoped_ he didn’t look happy. His tone was completely neutral. 

Anyone would have thought he was simply passing on the information as a matter of protocol. 

But Leslie bit the inside of her lip and tried to make sure she wasn’t breathing loudly, or making any weird faces, because… 

“Specifically, it _prohibits_ government employees from dating, especially when one is in a supervisory capacity over the other, because of the possibility of ethical breaches,” he continued. “I don’t think anyone in Pawnee has ever bothered to enforce this rule.”

“They haven’t,” Leslie said quickly. Clearly no one had ever enforced the rule, because she’d never heard of it, and she’d read the majority of Pawnee’s legal documents. Councilman Dexhart had definitely slept with at least two interns from Sewage, she remembered, and in the 1990s the head zookeeper had run off with someone from Transportation (it should have been a clue when all the roads leading to and from the zoo got repaved a decade ahead of schedule) and less than five years ago there had been some fairly disturbing rumors about Ethel Beavers and the former director of Animal Control. 

“But the rule does exist, and Chris is adamant about enforcing it.” 

“Okay.” Was this going where she thought it was going?

“There are very real consequences to _breaking_ the rule. One or both of the employees in violation could be fired.” 

“Okay.” 

“I’m telling you this—” Ben paused to swallow—“because for reasons known only to himself, Chris has decided that you should come to Partridge with me while I accept the key to the city to, quote, ‘provide moral support’ that I should not need because I am ‘literally the most responsible government employee’ he has ever met, ‘except for possibly Leslie Knope, and hey, Ben, I’ve just had a brilliant idea! Leslie Knope is great at providing moral support and you two work very well together, so why don’t you take Leslie to Minnesota with you.’” 

“I _am_ pretty great at moral support.” 

“I know.” Ben’s mouth turned up at one corner as he said it, and his hand inched just a tiny bit closer to hers. _That_ , the infinitesimal decrease in the proximity of his pinkie finger, made Leslie’s heart slam all the way down to her feet before it rose, absurdly, all the way back up to her throat. 

All the things Ben _hadn’t_ said hung between them, like the proverbial elephant in the room—a tiny elephant, hanging above the round table, waving its trunk around and oh, god, what was happening?

“Pardon me,” she said, horribly aware that her voice was coming out stiff and formal. “I have not visited the whiz palace in several hours.” 

Ben nodded, and she stood up. 

“Leslie,” he said, a few moments later.

“Hmm?”

“You’re in your office.”

“Your point?”

“The bathroom’s the other way.”

“I know,” Leslie replied, quickly. “I just needed—I didn’t need to get my phone to go to the ladies’ room; why would I need it for that? I’m not going to call Ann.” 

As she sped out of the department, she thought she heard a tiny, frustrated sigh. Whether it was Ben or the elephant, she couldn’t say. 

***

_BANG!_

April sat up. 

_BANG! Bang. Bang bang bang bang bang bang—_

“God,” she croaked. “I’m coming.” Where was her shirt? Where were her glasses? Where was anything? It was impossible to find stuff in Burley’s room. He kept it so uncluttered. 

Andy fell off of Burley’s bed. “Babe, what’s up?”

“I don’t know. Someone’s at the door.” 

“Is it Burley? Because if it is, we should probably pretend we weren’t having sex in his bed while he was at his girlfriend’s.” 

“It’s not Burley. Burley has a key.”

“Right,” agreed her husband. “That makes sense, because this is his house and he lives in it.”

_Bang bang bang bang bang bang_. 

“Put clothes on, I guess,” she muttered, silently cursing whoever was beating down the door first thing in the morning. 

Clad only in Andy’s dirty flannel shirt (what, it was almost like a dress on her), April flung open the front door to find a horribly perky small tornado. 

“April! Good morning. You look rested. Can I come in? Great.” Leslie, who for some reason was wearing a hoodie and yoga pants instead of a suit, pushed her way across the threshold without waiting for an answer. 

It was _not_ a good morning. One, April had to go to work, and two, she’d really wanted to have sex with her husband before she went to work. Now, it seemed, she wouldn’t have time for that. If it was even morning yet. It was still dark outside, which April was pretty sure meant that it was still last night. So maybe she would have time for sex before work, if her crazy boss left them alone… 

Oh, and three, her boss was acting slightly crazier than normal. 

“What are you doing here?” 

“Let’s get ready! Let’s get you ready. It’s road trip time!” 

What the hell was she supposed to say to that bit of insanity? There was nothing she _could_ say…so she didn’t. 

Leslie, who’d bustled all the way into the middle of the living room, abruptly spun on one heel. “Did you not get all my messages?” 

“No. My phone’s dead and I lost the charger.” It wasn’t and she hadn’t, but who checked texts from their boss in the middle of the night? Only losers did that. 

“Babe, I found your glasses—oh, hey, Leslie!” Andy bounded into the living room. He had not gotten dressed. At all. Leslie, to her credit, did a decent job of not freaking out more than she already was. Maybe, thought the meanest part of April’s brain (it was always loudest right after she woke up)—maybe Leslie _had_ seen a penis before. 

She didn’t verbalize the thought, but if even if she had, no one would have heard her. Leslie was off again, sweeping through Burley’s house, picking up random items of clothing and stuffing them into an empty guitar case she’d found on the floor. 

“No time to waste!” she called, on her way out the front door. 

April widened her eyes at her still-nude husband, the one who had managed to make sex interesting for like two months now, holding their chili Frisbee over his genitals. He widened his eyes too. 

“Come on, April!” Leslie yelled. 

“Where are we going? Another dumb camping trip?” She stomped back to Burley’s bedroom for her pants, her glasses, and a door with a lock that Leslie probably couldn’t pick. 

“Babe?”

“What?” 

“Can you let me in?”

“Is Leslie gone?”

“No, she’s waiting for you. Hey, where are you going?”

“I don’t know.” She located her underwear. That was something, at least. 

“Can I come with you?” 

It was the only good idea April had heard all morning, so she nodded and made out with him for a few minutes, until Leslie started calling each of their phones in turn. By the time they both got clothes on (and April had stuffed her contacts and makeup in her purse, figuring she could at least sneak into a bathroom before too many people saw her), Leslie was practically exploding. “We were supposed to be at Ben’s hotel twenty minutes ago,” she said, as April and Andy piled into the backseat with a bag of chips Burley had probably bought and Andy’s guitar. 

“Andy’s coming with us.” 

“Great! The more the merrier.” Leslie peeled out of the driveway before they could fasten seatbelts.

“Why isn’t Ben just meeting us wherever we’re going?” April muttered. But the question fell on deaf ears. Leslie had her eyes glued to the road, and Andy had fallen back asleep. 

Ben was standing in front of the Pawnee Super Suites when they pulled in, wearing one of those lame plaid shirts, a briefcase and a small suitcase stacked neatly at his feet. Leslie honked the horn twice (Andy, seated directly behind her, sat bolt upright and then collapsed back against the window) and stuck her hand out the window to wave at him. 

“We’re here!” 

“ _We_?” April couldn’t see Ben’s face from where she sat, but he sounded confused. “Pop the trunk, will you?”

“Oh. Um, there isn’t any room left in the trunk. Here, I’ll—” She jumped out of the car. “I can try to rearrange. April, help me move stuff around…” 

“Hello,” Ben said, nodding at April as she groaned her way out of the car. “What are you—are you coming with us?” 

“I thought it would be best,” Leslie said quickly, opening the trunk. “You know, just because April’s a real up-and-comer in local government—”

“Shut up,” April muttered. 

“And I think she’ll learn a lot from shadowing the two of us every hour of every day—”

“Good lord. Leslie, this trip is less than a week. How long were you planning to be gone?” 

One suitcase, the guitar case full of dirty clothes, Leslie’s briefcase, another suitcase, a duffel bag, a hanging garment bag, and a Caboodle that April ironically recognized as being genuinely from the 1990s were suddenly stacked at her feet, and two grocery bags of marshmallows and graham crackers were suddenly placed in her arms. 

“Well,” said Leslie, surveying the piles as though packing a car was one of those fun and challenging puzzles everyone hated, “it’s best to be prepared.” 

Ten minutes later, they were on the road out of town, Leslie behind the wheel and nattering on about gas mileage and dorm bunk beds and whatever, all of it was boring. Andy had started snoring loudly, and that was way more entertaining than anything Leslie was talking about, so April slid over to the middle of Leslie’s backseat and used her husband as a pillow. Andy made a super awesome pillow; he was warm and comfortable and smelled pleasantly of Cheetos. From here, she felt a little less irritated about Leslie practically kidnapping them. 

Apparently Leslie could see her in the rearview mirror, because she called, “April, are you wearing a seatbelt?” 

“God. Yes.” 

“Okay then. Safety first!” 

With a cold wash of fear, April realized her earbuds were in her desk drawer at work and she might never get them back. 

Whatever. She was still just as irritated about being kidnapped, even if she’d secretly always wanted to be kidnapped. But the appeal of being kidnapped was to be kidnapped by _strangers_ , and then lie to those strangers and convince them you were a witch, or an heiress, thus getting them to put a huge ransom on your head. Then you’d know for sure how much you were worth to your parents, but it wouldn’t really matter because you’d obviously escape, using a series of booby traps you set up while the kidnappers were out doing whatever they did during the day. April couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t have the relevant scenes from the first two _Home Alone_ movies memorized. That information had to be worth something in the real world. 

Or then there was the other, preferable saga: that she’d already been kidnapped, as an infant, and now her real parents—who were obviously wealthy, eccentric Europeans—had come to reclaim her, and exact their revenge. Though that didn’t work here, since there was no way in hell either Leslie or Ben could be her real parents. The first scenario was better, in this case. Anyway, she was married now, so Andy would help her fight her oppressors. 

_Kidnapper! I’ll ruin you for this!_ she thought as hard as she could, at the back of Ben’s head, but she wasn’t telepathic enough to get the image through his ridiculous hair and into his brain. He had his eyes glued on Leslie, in fact, even though she was talking about something boring and nerdy again. It was weird. 

Just before she slipped into a deep sleep, April realized she still had no idea where they were going. 

She didn’t wake up until they were seven miles north of Lafayette, though in fact she didn’t know they were seven miles north of Lafayette. She only knew the two morons in the front seat were singing some old-timey song about a guy named Tippecanoe and another guy named Tyler. It was horrible. Ben’s voice was even worse than Dave Matthews. 

“Shut up,” April moaned—but no one paid attention, so she willed herself back to sleep.

The next time she woke up, it was because Andy was shaking her and complaining loudly to everyone that he was hungry. 

“We can stop,” Leslie said. “It’s time to get gas and switch drivers anyway.” 

“Awesome.” Andy happy-punched the roof of Leslie’s car, which made Ben cringe. “Hey, so where are we going?” 

Ben stared incredulously into the back seat, then at Leslie. “You didn’t tell them?” 

“I did! I told April.”

“No, you didn’t.” Her back hurt and her head hurt and she was thirsty and had to pee. “Are we there yet?”

“In Partridge? Good lord, no. It’s a fourteen-hour drive without stops. We won’t be there until at least dinnertime.” 

It was a dumb joke, so April glared at him. “Where the hell is Partridge?” 

“Minnesota. Where I grew up.” 

“We’re going to Minnesota?”

“April, I texted you a million times last night!”

“Well, I didn’t look at my phone because I was having sex,” she stated flatly. 

Leslie nearly drove off the road. 

“Careful,” said Ben, thus sealing his fate as April’s least favorite person of all people. She still had no idea what they were doing, but if this wasn't a joke and they were going to his hometown, this was obviously his fault. 

She pushed her tongue against her front teeth for a moment before responding. “Did you not notice that I never replied to any of your texts?” 

“Babe, come on, this’ll be fun.” Andy tried to give her a high-five, but she crossed her arms against her chest and held them there, snug and secure. “Road trips are the best.” 

“I didn’t pack anything.”

“I packed for you!”

“You packed a bunch of dirty clothes off the floor.” 

“I’m sure you can do laundry at my sister’s house,” said Ben. “She won’t mind.” 

Oh. So Ben had a sister and they were staying with her. Great. 

“Um…” he continued. “Um, remind me to call Stephanie and tell her four people are coming, instead of just me?” 

“Dibs on the best guest room,” April said. If they were dragging her to Minnesota against her will, she deserved that much. 

Andy had become captivated by the passing scenery, but he suddenly perked up. “I do not have my toothbrush.”

“I have spare toothbrushes in my trunk,” said Leslie. They’d approached the next exit, and she pulled off the interstate. “Gas station to the left. Is everyone okay with grabbing snacks there?” 

At the end of the exit ramp, they waited. This was probably the world’s longest red light. 

“What about, like, deodorant and stuff?” April demanded. “I’m not sharing your deodorant.” And then she remembered something else they didn’t have with them. Something they definitely needed. She leaned over and whispered it in Andy’s ear, and his eyes widened. 

“Oh, crap,” he said aloud. “Babe, we definitely need to get some of those. Unless—hey, Leslie, do you have condoms?” 

From her perch in the center of the backseat, April had the perfect vantage point for watching Ben turn beet red. 

“Like, a lot of condoms,” Andy continued. “Because my wife is super hot and we will definitely be—you know.” 

“Andy, stop,” she muttered. 

Leslie had turned bright pink too. Then she turned her head half an inch to look at Ben, who was looking at her—and they both seemed to realize they were looking at each other, and hastily turned away. 

“Light’s green,” Ben choked out. 

“Right. Right, yes. I mean, not right. I’m turning left. Hang on!”

April knew about Chris’s dumb rule. See? There _had_ been an advantage to practicing her espionage skills by hiding behind various pieces of furniture in the city manager’s office. All she had wanted was to catch Chris eating a burger or a candy bar or something when he thought no one was looking, but instead she’d heard him explaining the no-dating rule to Joe from Sewage. Who would have thought that information would be valuable some day? 

And now she knew why she’d been dragged along on this dumb road trip. She wasn’t learning from Leslie’s example. She was a chaperone. 

_Eww_. 

“Can I have money for pop?” 

She was prepared to argue for it, protest that they couldn’t have expected her to bring money on a trip she didn’t know she was going on—but Ben, still a little pink around the ears, handed her a couple of twenties from his wallet without comment, or even so much as a backward glance. 

Inside the convenience store, she bought two orange pops, four Hostess cupcakes, and a thirty-six count of Trojan Magnums.

Ben didn’t bother to ask her for change.


	3. Road Trip/Back story

At this precise moment, Ben deeply regretted every decision he’d made in his life that had brought him to his current point. He regretted the big decisions (because he wouldn’t be driving on State Route 169 north of Elk River with Leslie, April, and Andy if he’d never run for mayor and been impeached and not received a key to the city) and he regretted the small decisions (he shouldn’t have gotten that coffee at the last gas station, since they’d agreed not to stop again until they reached Stephanie’s house).

But mostly, he regretted that he’d decided to read aloud the email his phone had just received from the Partridge mayor’s office. It was an agenda for the weekend. Apparently the festivities had expanded past the key ceremony itself, as though Partridge was determined to prove that it was now so well off that it could afford to throw money towards frivolous events.

The first item on the agenda was enough to give him a stress headache, and he opened his mouth to complain about it without conscious thought.

“Hey. Um, they’re going to throw some kind of ball after the key ceremony.” And they wanted to know if he was bringing a date, for the purposes of putting together seating charts. Or so they claimed.

“Hey, that sounds like fun,” said Leslie. “We’ll get dressed up.”

Tempting as it was to picture Leslie in a fancy dress (regardless of whether or not she’d packed one), Ben shook his head.

“No, I’m pretty sure that _ball_ is code for _we’re going to publicly humiliate you even more_.”

“Stop talking like that—”

“Which they would’ve done anyway,” he continued, talking over his designated moral support, “so I guess it doesn’t really matter how I’m dressed.”

“Did you bring a tux?”

“No, I—Leslie, why would I even own one?” 

“Hey,” piped up April, in the same tone Leslie had used to indicate _fun_. “You and Leslie should go as each other’s dates.”

Her voice was, of course, completely flat. Even if Ben had been able to see her face, he probably wouldn’t have been able to tell how facetious she meant to be.

It did end the agenda conversation for the time being, which was probably April’s intention.

Unfortunately, it also reminded Ben that he’d confided he had feelings for someone to his sister.

But he hadn’t told her any _details_. Only that there was someone he was interested in. He hadn’t even said they were coworkers. And that conversation had taken place weeks ago. Maybe Stephanie had…forgotten. He set his phone on the center console, closed his eyes, and began massaging his temples.

“No, you know what?” Leslie said, after a few minutes of gloomy silence. “April’s right. I should go with you. Look—” She swallowed once, hard, before continuing. “I’m here to be your moral support, right? And it’s not like I’m going to stay home from a ball. It’s not—it won’t be a real date. We’ll just go as friends. People do that all the time.”

Ben opened his eyes again, and blinked twice.

“Plus, April and Andy will be with us, so…”

Huh. Leslie was right. There was actually nothing fishy in that scenario.

“Okay,” he agreed, surprised at how relieved he felt. Leslie was here anyway, and at Chris’s suggestion. Of course Chris would understand Leslie accompanying him to the ball. And he danced badly enough that there would be very little risk of accidentally sweeping Leslie off her feet at any point during the evening.

“Oh, whoops.” A small, pale hand with dark nail polish extended from the backseat, holding out his phone. “I accidentally just told them you were bringing your lover.”

“April!” yelled Leslie. “You’d better be kidding.”

Ben grabbed his phone back, but the screen was locked, and for some reason he couldn’t unlock it again.

“I also accidentally changed your security key,” April informed him. “Don’t worry, Leslie, I was kidding.”

Leslie let out a little huff of relief. “Good.”

“If I was going to make you fake date somebody, it wouldn’t be Ben. I’d set you up with someone cooler.”

“Will you please change my phone back?” Ben asked, thrusting it into the backseat. April had her arms crossed tightly across her chest, though, and wouldn’t take the phone.

“I’ll do it when we get there.”

“No. Now.”

“C’mon, babe,” said Andy. “Let Ben use his phone.”

“Fine,” April huffed. “It’s lame.”

“It’s not _lame_ to want to use my phone.”

“The _password_ is lame.”

Ben typed “5263” into his phone, and sure enough, it unlocked. The battery was about five minutes from death, though.

It was still fine, Ben thought, as he changed his phone back to normal. He’d just email them when they got to Stephanie’s. And he hoped they would get there soon, because the coffee was weighing heavily on his bladder as much as the unshakable image of Leslie in a fancy dress was weighing on his mind.

They drove in silence for about twenty minutes, save for Andy’s humming.

Then, out of nowhere, Ben felt hands grab the back of the passenger seat and shake it.

“Stop the car,” said April. “Leslie, pull over.”

Leslie did, as soon as she could. “Are you okay? Are you going to be sick?”

“I’m fine.” April had already unbuckled her seat belt and jumped out of the car. “There’s a dog on the side of the road.”

“What? Oh, dude, a dog!” Andy jumped out of the car too.

Ben glanced over at the driver’s seat to Leslie, who met his gaze and shrugged. They both got out of the car too.

This might be the only chance he’d get to talk to Leslie alone for some time. What he would actually say to her now, though, he couldn’t fathom. She’d started shivering, arms hugged tightly to her chest. The temptation to try and warm her up with his own body heat was…well, he couldn’t think like that.

“Want me to grab a coat from the car?”

She shook her head. “I’ll be fine. It’s just colder outside than I thought.”

“Yeah, we’re in Minnesota.” He decided to watch April and Andy instead of Leslie. “Are they really trying to catch that dog?”

“I think it’s nice.”

“Well, yeah, but…what are we going to do if they catch it?”

Leslie didn’t seem to have an answer for that, so they stood quietly for a few minutes, listening to the November winds whipping through the sparse, bare trees. He hoped it wouldn’t snow while they were here. Partridge winters weren’t all that fun, not even the beginnings of them.

April, Andy, and a brownish blur began making their way back towards the car.

“Hey,” Leslie said. “I think they got the dog.”

As they got closer, it became apparent that the dog wasn’t walking normally.

“Is it hurt?” Leslie called. “Should I try to find a vet?”

“You guys, this dog’s kickass,” Andy yelled. “He’s been running around and he only has _three legs_.”

The dog, which was bigger than Ben had initially suspected, hopped along next to April, wearing a leash and collar fashioned from Andy’s flannel shirt. It was, indeed, missing a front leg. And it walked straight up to Ben and licked his hand.

“Hi,” he said, feeling a little stupid.

April crouched next to the dog and hugged it protectively. “We have to take him.”

Leslie looked a little concerned. “We can’t take a _dog_ —”

“Yes, we can,” said April, flatly. “We can’t leave a three-legged dog on the side of the road.”

To his own surprise, Ben found himself kind of agreeing with her. Not that he wanted this huge, probably smelly, possibly not housebroken dog in the car—and not that he wanted to explain it to Stephanie—but April was right. They couldn’t leave it on the side of the road.

“Well,” Leslie said doubtfully, “I guess we can take him to the pound in Partridge tomorrow morning or something. He might belong to somebody.”

Ben could’ve sworn he heard April mutter “he belongs to me” under her breath. She was still hugging the dog.

Andy crouched down next to the dog too. “I don’t know who would get rid of this dog. Look how awesome he is.”

The dog barked once, and licked Andy’s face.

“We should give him a name,” said April.

“Oh, no, that’ll make it harder not to get attached to him—” Leslie started.

But it was too late.

“Look at you,” Andy told the dog. “Running around out here in the wilderness. Alone. Those are awesome survival skills. You—” He was looking directly into the dog’s eyes, and the dog was staring back—“You deserve to be a champion.”

“That’s it.” April stood up. “His name’s Champion. Come on, Champion.”

Champion jumped into the backseat of Leslie’s car without hesitation, and panted happily the rest of the way to Partridge.

Ben considered that maybe, just maybe, he should have flown to Minneapolis and rented a car from there. 

***

When Stephanie Wyatt was a junior in high school, her older and generally quite responsible brother bankrupted their hometown. This was, undoubtedly, one of the more embarrassing things he could have managed to do.

The questioning, teasing, and taunting she received at school (which was considerable) was still nothing compared to the earfuls she received separately from each parent, as though it was somehow her fault that Benji had even run for mayor in the first place. It decidedly was not her fault. Benji hadn’t asked for her opinion, after all. But in this, as in all other perceived failures in Wyatt children that might possibly have been attributed to parenting, there was no one better to complain to than the middle child, the daughter who had always borne the burden of being a sensible good listener.

(Not that you needed to be a sensible good listener to get caught in the crossfire of arguments between their parents, but still. Between her and Benji—also usually a sensible good listener—they managed to keep Henry out of the worst of it. Small victories, they told each other silently, through mutually understood raised eyebrows and head shakes.)

“You know, your brothers have done some pretty stupid shit in their time, but _this_ ,” spat Steven, who never did bother to finish the sentence. “Thought your mother said he was supposed to be the smart one of you kids.”

Stephanie ignored the slight jab at her own intelligence.

“You might ask your father why he never taught Benji to manage finances. I _thought_ that was the purpose of forcing him to work at the Sunglass Hut,” said Julia.

Stephanie waited until her mother’s back was turned, then rolled her eyes up so far she could practically see her own brain.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Benji, who—upon discovering that his parents could in fact agree on one thing, and that thing was grounding him—had locked himself in his bedroom and refused to come out. 

Stephanie was a good kid, but her dad in particular was being an asshole, so she didn’t feel all that guilty about sneaking a bottle of vodka out of the wet bar when she and Henry went over for their weekly microwave lasagna dinner. She’d been thinking about developing a more rebellious streak anyway, just to see if she liked it. And there was the off chance that rebelliousness, once noticed, would get her parents to stop making so many passive-aggressive comments about each other to her. Besides, if she got caught, no one would blame _her_ for acting out. Not after she’d endured months of frosty comments at school. They’d blame Benji.

Still, her heart pounded in her throat a little as she slipped downstairs to the basement. The wet bar wasn’t locked, but it was definitely off-limits, and she didn’t exactly have a good reason to be in the basement. As she lifted the bottle, her hand trembled. The vodka bottle rattled into the bourbon on one side and the gin on the other. 

Thankfully, any clinking noises she might have produced were drowned out by a clipped, terse tirade directed at Henry, who’d just committed the unforgivable sin of changing TV channels without prior approval. She slid the bottle into her backpack, stuffed a sweatshirt over it, and headed back upstairs, where she wiped sweaty palms on her pants and prepared to tell her father she was having “girl problems,” if he asked. 

He didn’t.

It was the fourth day of Benji’s self-imposed solitary confinement, and even Benji’s sister was starting to feel a little bit of sympathy for him, although honestly, missing their dad’s microwave lasagna was hardly a punishment.

No one seemed to notice that her backpack was lumpy with something not book-shaped, or that it was heavier than usual. 

(Too late, Stephanie realized that cheering up her brother by performing a rebellious act for which he would be blamed if either of them got caught was maybe kind of a stupid plan. But it was too late not to go through with it. Anyway, she _probably_ wouldn’t be expelled if anyone caught her. Just grounded. Because, she told herself, underage drinking wasn’t nearly as bad as bankrupting the city.)

That night, after their mom fell asleep, she convinced Benji to leave his bedroom cave. They snuck into the backyard with the vodka, a bottle of orange juice, and two green plastic sippy cups from their childhood. The lids had been lost long ago. She wondered why they still had the cups. Henry had stopped using them when he was five, and he was thirteen now.

“How drunk do you think we can get without Mom noticing?” Benji asked.

She shrugged. “I’d be more worried about Henry tattling. How well do you hold your liquor?” One of the girls in her drama club had visited an older sibling in college recently, and returned with advanced knowledge of mixed drinks, so she felt confident in her bartending abilities as she handed Benji a lidless sippy cup filled with equal proportions vodka and orange juice.

Benji shrugged himself, contemplated her expertly made screwdriver, and swallowed the whole thing in one gulp. “Good lord, that’s disgusting.”

She felt bad laughing at him, but couldn’t help it. The face he was making… “Too strong?” she teased.

He shook his head stubbornly and held out his cup for a refill.

Screwdrivers, Stephanie decided when she tasted her own, were a lot like drinking orange-scented nail polish remover. (She decided she’d only have one, and ended up drinking less than a quarter of it.)

They didn’t talk about why they were drinking, or what would happen next. They talked, somewhat absurdly, about Stephanie’s AP English class, and Shakespeare. Both tried, and failed, to recite a complete sonnet.

As it turned out, they could get awfully drunk without their mother or Henry noticing. As it also turned out, Benji—who really _hadn’t_ done much stupid shit, regardless of what their father thought, and apparently hadn’t learned to drink yet—did not hold his liquor well at all. At least she didn’t have to hold his hair back when he started puking in the rosebushes. He needed a haircut, but not that badly.

The puking was kind of a literal internal cleansing, but it might have triggered a metaphorical inner cleansing as well. Benji looked like hell when he stumbled downstairs the next morning, even though she’d made him drink a ton of water before he went to bed, but he seemed a little less on edge. Any reasonable person might have assumed that this was just because of the hangover, but Stephanie chose to also believe that her older brother had crossed some kind of threshold into adulthood.

It was the beginning and the end of her deliberately rebellious streak, though she only half realized it at the time. 

“Sleep well, Ben?” she asked, grinning behind their mother’s back. _She_ didn’t have a hangover.

He made a face at her, the same one he’d used to make on extended car trips when they were little and he wanted to be annoying. But despite the childish gesture, from then on he was Ben, not Benji.

Somehow, that set the tone for what would become their adult relationship. They didn’t communicate particularly often, and they didn’t tend to discuss the biggest, hardest stuff in their lives. But they could rely on each other when they needed to blow off steam about their parents (in a way neither of them could do with Henry), and they could rely on each other for quiet support when needed. It was funny, really, because even though they never talked about it directly, she knew Ben had much different ideas about love and romance than she did.

So she never told him she thought he could do better in the girlfriend department (in part because she could never put her finger on anything _wrong_ ; she just knew the few women he’d introduced her to weren’t _right_ ).

Ben didn’t say anything judgmental when her slowly fizzling marriage to a man she’d chosen because he was utterly unlike either of their parents finally petered out completely, even though she knew Ben had found her husband kind of boring (which, she now admitted to herself, he was). He just offered to take a week off work to help out, though in the end she insisted Ben not take time off work just to move some boxes around Partridge. 

They both got a good laugh when, newly divorced, she came to Indianapolis for a few days and somehow wound up in a very awkward private life coaching seminar with Ben’s auditing partner; later, they tried to figure out whether it was supposed to have been a date.

“There was wine?” he asked, when she was safely back in the tiny one-bedroom apartment that could only be described as _not that bad_.

“There was wine,” she confirmed, “but then I also got a very graphic description of his bodily functions following hundred-mile cycling races.”

“Did he try to kiss you?”

“No.” It had been a long, long time since his slightly protective older brother side had come out, and she smiled a little. “He said something complimentary about my gluteus maximus, but does it really count if he used the anatomical term for the muscle?”

Ben looked horrified, so she supposed that meant yes. Either that or he didn’t want to think about his sister’s ass.

Whether or not her brother was happy, she didn’t really know. Though at times she suspected he could maybe be happier, she chose to believe he would say something to her if he was really miserable. And he never did. Anyway, she understood the appeal of _not that bad_ , perhaps a little too well. That was how she’d wound up in her marriage, after all, and how she usually felt about her own career, as an English teacher at the very high school she’d once attended. 

So it came as a bit of a shock when Ben casually mentioned he’d decided to stay, permanently, in that town he’d been auditing forever.

“Seriously? That seems like kind of a big risk.”

“I mean, it’s a pretty good job.” He sounded like he was trying to justify his decision to her, so she decided to play devil’s advocate.

“Your old job’s not that bad.”

“It’s not. But this…could be better?”

“I just—I guess I didn’t know you wanted to get off the road.”

“Honestly, I didn’t either, until the opportunity came up.”

He paused for a moment. Stephanie could practically picture him—he’d be sitting at the table in his motel room, phone in his right hand, left forearm across the tabletop, with the same slightly eager expression he used to wear at breakfast on the mornings before he left for Model U.N. conferences.

Why she had thought of their childhood just then, she had no idea.

“So are you going to buy a house now?”

“Good lord, no. Not yet.”

“Well.” She suddenly realized she was sitting in the same exact position at her own kitchen table, and hastily stood up to stretch her legs. “If you’re happy, I’m happy.”

“I’m happy. I think I’m happy.”

“Then I’m happy for you.” But she couldn’t resist throwing in one little jab. “Hey, how’s the dating pool in Pawnee?” Ben hadn’t mentioned going on a date in months, now that she thought about it. In fact, it might have been more than a year since he’d mentioned a woman. She wondered if the wild romantic streak he’d always tried to suppress had finally worn off.

Of course, it was almost as likely that he had been dating, and just hadn’t found anyone important enough to tell her about. 

“Oh,” he said, like the question was especially surprising. “Oh, it’s fine. I think. Or Chris says it is. I haven’t—I haven’t really, uh, dipped my toes in yet.”

She waited.

“There’s kind of someone.”

She waited some more.

“Not that we’re dating—we’re not, we haven’t been—but, you know, _theoretically_. If she was interested.”

“Um. Are you going to find out if she is?”

“I think so.” Ben cleared his throat and then spoke more confidently. “Yes. I’m going to.”

That was the last long, important phone conversation they’d had, and it was the phone conversation she remembered when Ben showed up at her house, in a car that wasn’t his that was full of people she wasn’t expecting. She had no context whatsoever for the youngish, disheveled, slightly disgruntled couple that tumbled out of the back seat with a large three-legged dog. But she recognized the petite blonde woman immediately, from photographs of that festival thing Ben had been working on.

She decided to ignore the large three-legged dog for the time being, even though it was urinating on her rosebushes.

“Hi,” Ben said, once he’d popped open the trunk. He looked exhausted. Not surprising, after a fourteen-hour drive. “Did you get my message about the extra people?”

“No. I haven’t checked my voicemail all day.” She wished she had, though since she’d only been home for a few minutes, knowing more people were coming wouldn’t have made much of a difference. Extending a hand, she stepped over to the blonde woman. “Stephanie. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Leslie Knope.” Leslie’s handshake was firm, but Stephanie couldn’t help noticing that she quickly glanced over her shoulder at Ben. “I’m sorry we’re all imposing on you like this.”

“Oh, it’s no problem,” Stephanie assured her, though in fact it kind of was, because she only had one guest room. “We’ll find somewhere to put everybody.”

“I can stay in a hotel,” Leslie offered, but that seemed silly. Stephanie waved her off, gesturing towards the house instead. Ben had already rushed into the house, carrying the first few bags from an absurdly large pile of luggage, enough for six or seven people.

Well, she’d just roll with the punches.

At least the backyard was fenced in. She’d often wondered why she’d bought a house with a kid-friendly backyard when she was no longer married and didn’t have kids. Apparently some part of her had anticipated that her brother would show up with a low-level government employee, her shoeshine husband, and a dog they’d just found on the side of the road.

He had also shown up with Leslie, who immediately proved herself the most welcome of the unexpected guests by producing a large tin of homemade gingersnaps. Gingersnaps were Stephanie’s favorite cookies. She wondered if Leslie had known that. She wondered _how_ Leslie would have known that, if she even did, because she wasn’t sure Ben knew.

“April and Andy make a lot of…” Ben trailed off and looked helplessly at Leslie.

“Snap decisions,” she finished. “They got married after dating for about a month. I mean, they have known each other for longer than that. Still kind of a snap decision, though, huh?”

“Good lord,” Stephanie said. The newlyweds looked happy now, but…a month?

“It seemed a little crazy to me too.” Leslie sighed, pushing her hair behind one ear. “But sometimes you just have to roll the dice.”

The three of them sat around the kitchen table with gingersnaps and coffee, and began discussing what they ought to do about dinner. It was a short conversation. Leslie asked whether there was a decent diner, Stephanie said there was, and apparently that meant a decision had been made.

April pushed through the side door, followed by Andy and the dog, and announced that she was starving and that Minnesota was stupid and cold.

“Let’s go!” Leslie bounced up from the table. “Stephanie says there’s a good diner. Ben, are you ready?”

Ben was focused on the dog, which Stephanie wasn’t aware she’d decided to let in her house. He was inside now, though. “Is he housetrained?”

“How should I know? We’ve only had him two hours.”

“You wouldn’t do anything, would you, Champion?” said Andy. “Because you’re the most awesome dog in the universe. That’s right.”

“But you really don’t know if he’s housetrained.” Stephanie made sure she didn’t phrase the sentence as a question.

“He didn’t do anything in the car,” said April, who was apparently unaware that Stephanie was a high school teacher and immune to that kind of staring.

In the end, they decided to order pizza rather than leave the dog alone, though that didn’t solve the problem of whether or not he’d do anything in the middle of the night. 

But soon enough, Stephanie was distracted from the questions of whether the carpet in her one guest bedroom was going to take a beating, or when she realized she’d agreed to let the dog stay in the house in the first place, or whether she could find the air mattress to put in the office for Leslie.

As the evening progressed, and everyone settled down, she began to notice certain…details.

Like that her brother sat close to Leslie, close enough to touch her, but was very definitely trying not to touch her. Like that he complimented her so frequently and naturally that Stephanie wondered if there was something in Pawnee’s water supply, because she’d never seen _that_ before. (Andy and April didn’t seem to notice or care, but then again, they were absorbed in the dog.) Like that Leslie, who clearly wasn’t shy, had a tendency to bite her lip and smile at the floor whenever Ben complimented her.

Like that each of them told truly terrible jokes that the other seemed to find genuinely funny.

Leslie wasn’t his type; at least, not that she knew of. But she wondered. All those photos Ben had emailed from the festival? Leslie had been responsible for the festival, she remembered. Leslie’s name had come up quite a bit over the past few months, in fact. Relatively speaking.

Later that evening, after she’d set up the air mattress, she came downstairs with a pile of sheets for the fold-out couch in the living room and walked in on the two of them pointing finger guns and making laser noises at each other. It was, somehow, grosser than anything she’d walked in on Ben doing with any girls in high school. (Not that he’d done very much with very many girls in high school.)

She cleared her throat.

“Excuse me,” muttered Leslie. “I’m going to…to get something from my purse. In bed. Good night.”

“Night,” said both Wyatts, in unison. 

Stephanie handed her brother the pile of sheets, raising her eyebrow as she did so.

“So. You didn’t tell me you—” She stopped talking when Ben groaned heavily and flopped down on the couch.

“I _didn’t_ ,” he told her. “I can’t. There’s a _rule_.”

From upstairs, they heard a single _woof_. It seemed to spur Ben to get up and start making the couch into a bed.

“Did I tell you there’s a _ball_ tomorrow night?” He handed her the throw pillows, which she set aside. “April emailed the committee and told them Leslie and I were dating, and I haven’t been able to correct them on that point yet. And since Leslie’s already here…she thinks we should just go and it somehow won’t be weird.” He sighed. “I think we like each other, Steph. I think she tried to ask me out the other day. And we _can’t_.”

“Go to bed,” Stephanie said, briefly gripping Ben’s shoulder in a way that she hoped was supportive. His shoulder felt tense. Ben always felt tense. So that hadn’t changed. “We’ll talk about it later.”

“Wait,” she heard, as she left the living room. “Is it really that obvious?”

She knew it was cruel to laugh at her brother, but when she turned around and saw the look on his face, she couldn’t help it. 

“Oh, god,” he muttered, burying his face in his hands. “This is...you know I think this whole thing is probably a conspiracy to humiliate me in the first place.” 

“It might not be.”

“You know that’s why Leslie came with me. Chris thought she’d be good moral support.” 

Stephanie thought for a moment, then went to the kitchen, uncorked a bottle of wine, and poured two glasses. 

“I don’t have vodka,” she said, handing one to Ben, who’d followed her into the kitchen. 

He cringed. “This is fine. Thanks.” 

“So.”

“So.” 

Stephanie took a couple of sips of wine. She absentmindedly twisted the fingers of her right hand around her left ring finger, searching for the ring she hadn’t worn in several years. 

She’d married for safety. The last risk romantic risk she’d taken had been...never, really. 

“Benji,” she found herself saying, “just go with it tomorrow.” 

He nearly spat red wine over her white kitchen.

“I mean it. Don’t tell the committee you’re not dating.” 

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. Look, if you can’t date, isn’t it better to have at least one day of pretending you can?” 

Ben shook his head. “I don’t know.” 

And she could see the point he wasn’t bothering to make, she really could. Pretending to date for one day would most likely make going back to not-dating harder. But not dating was, she thought, kind of stupid. Maybe if they had a little nudge--say, a dinner and a couple of formal dances--they’d feel compelled to find a way around the no-dating rule. 

Maybe.

She did have a card up her sleeve.

“Did you know Cindy Eckert’s on your official committee?” she asked, deliberately keeping her voice neutral. “She’s divorced now, by the way.” 

Ben glared at her over his wine, then drank the rest of the glass in one gulp and pushed it back to her for a refill.


	4. Fake Dating!

Leslie awoke just slightly earlier than usual, a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. It took her a moment to realize that the sinking feeling wasn’t nerves (what did she have to be nervous about?) as much as a slow leak in the air mattress that was making her literally sink to the floor.

The deflation explained why her back hurt—well, that and all the hours they’d spent driving yesterday. She rolled off the air mattress, stood up, and tried in vain to stretch the space between her shoulder blades, which felt like it had more knots than her favorite macramé owl.

According to her phone, it was barely five in the morning. The sun hadn’t quite started to come up. When she peeked through the curtains, outside looked cold. Inside was a little bit cold, too, and though she’d probably over-packed a little, she hadn’t brought any bedroom slippers. She’d have to put on socks…or she could shower. Warm water would feel good over her feet. But it was probably too early to shower; she’d wake up everybody upstairs. And it was probably too early to go downstairs. Ben was sleeping in the living room and she didn’t want to wake him up. She especially didn’t want to see him in pajamas, because she suspected the sight would be dangerously cute.

Little League presentation planning it was, then. Stephanie’s home office was meticulously organized, her desktop clear and uncluttered. She wouldn’t mind if the workspace was put to good use, Leslie was sure of it.

She did wish there was a way to make coffee appear without having to go downstairs and make it and wake everyone up and see Ben in pajamas. But she couldn’t think of one, so she switched on the overhead light, spread out her binders, and got to work.

About fifteen minutes later, she heard a light tap at the door. Just a knuckle grazing the wood, really.

“Come in,” she muttered, just louder than a whisper, spinning the desk chair around to see Ben push the door open and stick the upper half of his body in the room.

He wasn’t wearing pajamas. He’d gotten dressed already, a cardigan buttoned snugly over his usual plaid. It was chilly downstairs too, Leslie supposed. 

The cardigan, unfortunately for her, was cute. Dangerously cute. Possibly even cuter than pajamas.

Crap on a catcher’s mitt.

“Hey.” Ben’s voice was low, quiet, almost apologetic. “I…thought I heard you thinking.”

“What are you doing up?”

He took a moment to process the question. She could see him thinking, probably about why he was awake at this hour—but when he spoke, he didn’t give her a direct answer. “We need to talk.”

“Okay.”

“ Can you—do you want to go get breakfast? Like at that diner? It’s open 24 hours.”

Leslie nodded. “Okay,” she repeated.

“Okay,” Ben repeated after her, before his upper body disappeared into the hallway and the door silently latched behind it.

Fifteen seconds, she told herself, steeling her body for the unpleasant removal of her toasty warm pajamas—which, she realized too late, Ben had just seen her wearing.

She half hoped he’d thought they were dangerously cute. But only half. Because, well, things would be entirely less complicated if he hadn’t. But it didn’t matter. She’d get dressed in fifteen seconds regardless. No, ten. No, she’d just get dressed now.

Quickly, she grabbed the first clothes she came to that made an acceptable casual breakfast outfit: a bra, a camisole, a sweater, and her favorite jeans. She’d have to change for whatever official activities they had scheduled later, but that was fine. There was no point in putting her suit on just to go to a diner, especially not before she’d showered. Her hair desperately needed something (probably...a shower) but she just threw it into a ponytail for the time being. Then she stared into her cosmetic bag for a good thirty seconds.

Was she trying to attract Ben, or not? Would makeup have an effect on that one way or another? Maybe he was one of those guys who didn’t like makeup, or didn’t notice it. Maybe she’d be more attractive to him if she wasn’t wearing any. Maybe she shouldn’t even be thinking about whether or not she wanted to attract him, because although she obviously did, it wasn’t a prudent course of action, not when they couldn’t date.

In the end, she ducked into the bathroom for a few moments—she had to brush her teeth, at any rate, that was just common sense—and came out again wearing just a little mascara and lip gloss. And some concealer smeared under her eyes, for good measure.

Ben was waiting for her at Stephanie’s small, round kitchen table with their coats piled in his lap, one leg crossed over the other, his foot bobbing in a rather arrhythmic manner. Two empty wine glasses and a not-quite-empty bottle of Chianti had been shoved into a corner of the kitchen counter. She wondered how late he and Stephanie had been up last night, and what they’d been talking about—though it probably wasn’t any of her business, really.

“Ready,” she said, deciding at that moment that everything would go more smoothly for both of them if she pretended she did not find him attractive and had no interest in dating him.

As soon as she made the resolution, though, Ben stood up and started helping her into her coat. Damn him. She didn’t need chivalry, exactly; just…the gesture felt _thoughtful_. Thoughtfulness, she liked. 

“I can do it.” She snatched her right sleeve away. “I mean—sorry, I didn’t—thank you.”

Letting Ben drive to the diner seemed easiest, so she tossed her keys to him from several feet away, thus ensuring that no one accidentally touched anyone else’s hand. Though Ben pointed out the occasional interesting tree or building, they didn’t speak much on the short drive over. Probably because of fatigue. Probably.

Ben waited until they had been seated in a quiet corner of the diner, placed their orders, and received coffee before he took a deep breath, tapped his fingers lightly on the tabletop, and informed her that April had in fact told his welcoming committee that they were dating.

“Oh.” Sure, that news took her slightly by surprise, but he could’ve just _told_ her. It wasn’t a big deal, really. They didn’t need to go out to breakfast to discuss it. “Well, you can just explain that it was a miscommunication, right?”

“Yeah, I—” He nodded once. “I can do that. Of course.”

Curling her fingers around the mug, Leslie blew softly into her coffee, enjoying the steam hat wafted around her nose. “Maybe I shouldn’t have brought April.”

“Maybe not.” Ben smiled at her over _his_ coffee when she said it, and she had a sudden urge to tell him _not_ to tell his welcoming committee that they weren’t dating. No, that was stupid. They couldn’t really date, so while it would be _fun_ to pretend for an evening, there was—she started making a list in her head—one, there wasn’t a real reason to do that other than she wanted to do it; two, pretending to be a couple for an evening would just make it harder when they had to go back to Pawnee and just be coworkers who benefitted from the fact that they were friends; three, a tallish, moderately attractive brunette woman about their age was now leaning over their booth. Ben stood up, and Leslie tried to do the same—but the woman had blocked her side of the booth, and she couldn’t get out. 

She tapped her fingers on the table, as though playing an imaginary tiny piano would somehow alleviate the sensation of being trapped.

“Well, if it isn’t Benji Wyatt.” The woman drawled out his name. It sounded all wrong that way, Leslie thought. The little hairs on the back of her neck bristled.

“Cindy.” Ben swallowed, though Leslie didn’t think he’d been drinking anything. “Good to see you.”

“You must be, uh…” Cindy smiled at Leslie now, a polite smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes.

Leslie thrust her hand upwards in a gesture that felt uncomfortably childlike. “Leslie Knope.”

“Leslie, hi. You must be the person that Ben—hi, I’m Cindy Eckert-Rasmussen. Well—” Cindy dropped the handshake quickly, which was a relief. That had been a dead fish handshake if Leslie had ever felt one. “I should really get around to taking off the Rasmussen. But it’s on my credit cards, you know?” She laughed, rather horribly—a dead fish laugh, too, though Leslie hadn’t previously realized anyone could laugh like a dead fish. “So, are you looking forward to the festivities today?”

Ben cleared his throat. “Oh, well. Yeah, I guess so.”

That, Leslie thought, had maybe been the least convincing sentence she’d ever heard him utter.

“Of course,” she said, her voice coming out just a little bit louder than she’d intended, possibly because Cindy Eckert-Rasmussen had turned her full attention to Ben, as though Leslie wasn’t even there anymore. As though Cindy hadn’t just half-acknowledged that Leslie might, in fact, be Ben’s girlfriend. “We both are. Definitely.”

 _Cindy_ , she thought. _Cindy Eckert-Rasmussen, minus the Rasmussen, so Cindy Eckert_. She knew that name, didn’t she? There was a connection to Ben (obviously, or else why would Cindy be here right now) but the exact nature of the connection was escaping her at the moment. 

Cindy Eckert-Rasmussen was going on at length now, chatty and upbeat, about their agenda for the day. A guided tour of City Hall that morning, if they wanted it, “since you never really got to know the place very well, Benji.” A ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new outdoor skating rink that afternoon—“you’ll like that, it was almost your idea in the first place, except we didn’t go broke this time.” And then the ball, of course—“I’ll save a dance for you this time, Benji, promise.” She laughed, as though she’d said something funny, which Leslie certainly didn’t think was the case.

But the connection struck her, finally. This was the person who had turned Ben down for junior prom.

It was such a small slight, and such a long time ago, that surely it didn’t matter anymore. Leslie had turned down a boy for junior prom (he was cute, but he had once insulted Hillary Clinton’s legs) and as far as she knew, he’d turned out okay. Ben had definitely turned out okay. _She’d_ been turned down by plenty of guys in her youth (and afterwards), and _she_ had turned out okay.

And surely Cindy—though it seemed she was recently divorced—wasn’t actually _flirting_ with Ben now. She was just teasing him. In a very mean way that Leslie didn’t like. Though Cindy obviously didn’t much care what Leslie thought, since she hadn’t even bothered to finish confirming whether the two of them were together.

The hairs on the back of Leslie’s neck were still standing up, and maybe that was the final straw—the thing that made her slide out of the booth (thus knocking Cindy out of the way), sidle up to Ben, squeeze an arm around his waist, and say, “You already promised me all the dances. Didn’t you, honey?”

Ben went rigid, so she nudged his chest with her shoulder, willing him to play along. Or at least to relax, a little.

“Oh, right.” His arm had gone around her shoulders almost immediately, and now he was looking at his own hand, apparently surprised to find it resting on Leslie’s blue striped sweater. He didn’t remove it, though. “I did…do that.”

Mercifully, their food showed up just then, and Cindy took its arrival as a cue to excuse herself. “See y’all in a few hours!” she chirped, the heels of her sensible, unattractive boots clomping across the diner’s faded linoleum floor.

There was _parsley_ on the plate with Leslie’s waffle. One pale, unattractive orange wedge, and _parsley_. She made a face, carefully picked up the offending sprig with two fingers, and discarded it onto the tabletop, next to the saltshaker. 

Then she put the orange wedge next to it, for good measure. And deliberately dumped all the whipped cream the waitress had brought her (there wasn’t much) onto the center of the waffle. And spread the whipped cream so that there was at least a tiny amount in every pocket of her waffle. And—

“Leslie.”

She looked up to see Ben leaning over the table, eyebrows slightly raised.

“Are we—are you—what just happened?”

She wasn’t entirely sure herself, except that she’d done the right thing. She was sure about that. “You said April told the organizing committee that we were dating,” she started.

“Yeah, but I thought we had just agreed that we were going to tell them there had been a misunderstanding.”

Leslie bit her lip.

“Because I will be okay,” he continued. “Even though every time I find out something new about their plans for today, I’m even more convinced they put the whole thing together to humiliate me.”

“Well, that’s why.” Needing something to do with her hands, she began cutting into the waffle.

“You want to pretend we’re dating because you think it’ll make things less humiliating?”

“No,” she said, quickly. “That’s not it.”

“You just said—”

“I know you’ll be okay. You already are okay. You don’t need me here at all. But…”

She paused, and let her gaze wander from Ben’s concerned left eyebrow to the few other patrons in the diner. Most of them were a good twenty or thirty years older than they were, and she couldn’t help but imagining all of them picking on a teenage Benji Wyatt. And yes, he’d made some really stupid decisions, but all eighteen-year-olds did that. And he’d been _trying_ so much harder than any of the older diner patrons would have done, whether they were eighteen or thirty-eight or fifty-eight; she’d bet money on that. And—she swallowed, and returned her gaze to Ben’s concerned left eyebrow—she really, really liked the person teenage Benji Wyatt had turned into.

“But?” he asked. The concerned eyebrow went up a notch, and Leslie took a deep breath.

“I think you might be right about the committee’s intentions. And I don’t like it. That’s why.”

In the ensuing pause, Leslie bit into her waffle. It was already freezing cold. Whether that was the diner’s fault or just a general hazard of Minnesota, she didn’t know. Ben’s omelet still looked warmish, though he hadn’t paid it any attention.

“I feel like I missed a step in this plan.” He contemplated his toast momentarily and then looked up again. “How does us pretending to be a couple help the situation?”

“I don’t know,” Leslie admitted. “I just…it makes us seem like more of a team—which I know you don’t need; you’re fine on your own. But we’re a good team.”

Ben did the terrible thing with his mouth then, the really cute half-smile that made her want to crawl across the table and kiss it off his face. She restrained herself, though. Fake dating would almost certainly _not_ involve fake making out. Or real making out. Or any making out. Or would it? Probably it shouldn’t. Fake dating was already pushing the no-dating rule to its limits; fake _kissing_ definitely went over the line. The stupid, stupid line.

Maybe if Ben just kissed her on the cheek or something. That might be okay. Like Europeans. Chris probably did that to people all the time.

A light bulb flickered overhead, just distracting enough to snap her back to attention. Ben was still making the face.

“We are,” he said, “a _really_ good team.”

“So?”

He shook his head. “I can’t believe I’m about to agree to this again—”

“Again?”

“Oh.” His cheeks turned a little pink, maybe. “Last night Steph and I were—she thought we should just—well, anyway.” He held up his coffee cup. “To pretending.”

“To pretending,” Leslie echoed, clinking her own coffee against his.

Ben finally stuck a fork into his omelet, and pulled out a solid congealed block of cheese. “Well, that’s cold,” he stated, rather unnecessarily. Then he shrugged and ate it anyway.

“Let’s talk strategy,” Leslie suggested.

“Strategy?”

“Details. We have to be convincing about this, right?”

“I guess so,” Ben agreed.

“So we have stuff to figure out. When and where was our first date, for example?”

“Not long ago. Not until after I stopped working for the state budget office. It’s definitely unethical to have a relationship with an employee of a government you’re auditing.”

“Fair enough,” she said, nodding. “Or—well, couldn’t it have been as soon as your project was officially over?”

“You mean the Harvest Festival?” Ben sat up a little straighter. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Like…” The ideas were percolating now, bubbling just behind Leslie’s eyeballs, ready to froth over. She thought back to Andy and April’s wedding, the day she’d finally admitted to herself that she _liked_ liked Ben, and then she thought about the party itself, and how a terribly unplanned surprise wedding had dredged up so many of her own upsetting romantic memories.

If she couldn’t have a real relationship with Ben, she could at least plan the heck out of this fake one.

“Okay, so at Andy and April’s wedding,” she suggested. “We left the house after I rescued you from Orin, and we went out for dessert—”

“Because there wasn’t any cake?”

“Because there wasn’t any cake. We went out for dessert and it wasn’t really a date, or it didn’t start out as one, but on the way out of the restaurant, we—I don’t know, we held hands, and then we went on a real date the next night.”

Ben nodded slowly. “That’s not bad,” he said. “But how about this? We were on that camping trip, and we were brainstorming at sunset, and when the first star came out, you saw it and thought of the observatory.”

That was good, Leslie thought. Mostly. “Okay, but that story doesn’t end in us dating.”

“So we kissed as the sun went over the hill. Your hair was glowing in the pollution. Very romantic.”

Leslie tried to ignore the warm feeling that had started building in the pit of her stomach, and shook her head. “And then we went back to all our coworkers and wound up in a bed and breakfast with a weird old lady and forty cats?”

“Oh, good point. Okay.”

The waitress came by to ask if everything was okay, and they waved her off silently, although they probably should have asked for a microwave.

“Got it,” Ben said, as soon as she was gone. “It was the last day of the Harvest Festival. We were supervising the cleanup. Almost everything was gone, except for the corn maze. We decided to walk through it one last time, and when we got to the middle, we split one last cone of cotton candy—”

“And our fingers brushed together while we were tearing off pieces?”

“No, because you don’t eat cotton candy that way. You just bite into it. So there was a little wisp of pink stuff right there at the corner of your mouth—” he pointed—“and I thought, _well, technically my job’s over now_ , and I kissed the cotton candy off.”

Leslie’s heart pulsed, and her insides got extra squishy, and her lady parts…well, she tried to ignore those.

It was hard not to remember that this scene had actually occurred, minus the cotton candy and the kissing. But they had definitely gone for a last walk in the corn maze together. What had even happened in the middle? They’d done the Master Handshake one last time; that was it.

“I like that one.” Crap on a Ferris wheel, what had happened to her voice? It had gotten very quiet. She cleared her throat. “But I think this might be easier to pull off if we haven’t been dating quite as long.”

“Okay.” Ben took a deep breath. “Your dessert idea, then? And our first real date was…the zoo.”

“Why the zoo?”

“When I first got to town, you had promised to show me the penguin exhibit.”

Had she? She couldn’t remember anymore.

“Oh, good lord,” Ben said, looking at his watch. “We’ve been here an hour and a half. We should go back to the house.”

Leslie nodded. “We can brainstorm more in the car.”

“That gives us less than ten minutes to work out the rest of the details. Enough time?”

“We’ll be fine. We’ll just play off each other.” She smiled. “I think you’re going to be a very good fake boyfriend.”

Ben threw some money on the table without really looking, and muttered something about the fact that they knew each other pretty well.

Apparently, he knew her well enough to know she was still hungry—it was true that she hadn’t eaten more than five or six bites of waffle—because he pulled into a donut shop before she could say anything about it.

“Andy and April will appreciate this,” she said, when he handed her a couple of boxes before getting back into the car. “Why’d you buy so many?”

“Oh, the small box is éclairs,” Ben told her. “They’re really good here. You like éclairs, right?”

Leslie’s mouth went dry.


	5. Fake Dating, Continued

Ben bent forward, dropped his chin to his chest, and breathed in a healthy lungful of steam. 

Not even the longest, hottest shower he could get away with taking was enough to wash away the sensation of Leslie tucked under his arm. It had been about an hour since she’d been there, an hour since Leslie had popped out of the diner booth and commandeered the situation, an hour since she’d baldly lied about their relationship status to Cindy, an hour since he’d played along. Not that Leslie had left him a whole lot of choice. 

What was alarming, and a little bit surprising, was that his body had played along so well before his brain had caught up. His brain had been pretty well left out of the conversation entirely, in fact--he hadn’t _thought_ about playing along, he’d just _done_ it. Unconscious boyfriend gestures weren’t totally unprecedented in his lifetime, of course. But they were dangerous. Flirting, dating, relationship-style touching—those things typically took some effort to pull off, especially in the beginning stages of a relationship. And if whatever mysterious force field Leslie emanated was powerful enough to make him not have to wonder about where his limbs were supposed to go, made him _natural_ , well, what chance did soap and water have against it? 

It was both a good thing and a bad thing. Good because they might just be able to pull off the relationship conceit for a day. Bad because he might actually implode before the end of the night. Or accidentally kiss her. He could fake hold her hand and explain it away to Chris if he had to, but kissing? There was no way he would be able to kiss Leslie and pretend it was anything less than sincere. 

And regardless of today’s outcome, once they got home, he’d have to go right back to pretending he wasn’t crazy about her. 

Damn it. 

Someone banged on the bathroom door. “God, leave hot water for the rest of us,” yelled April’s voice. 

He turned off the shower, dried himself, and--feeling somewhat stupid--held out his left arm at exactly Leslie height.

Yeah, he could still feel her there. 

Damn it. 

At least his brain had caught up quickly enough, when it had finally cranked into gear. And at least he had a distraction from his imminent daylong humiliation. And at least he’d have Steph and April and Andy to distract him from his distraction. His distraction had planned things a little too well, bringing them along, and he tried not to wonder what (if anything) that meant while he shaved and buttoned himself into one of his few plain white shirts. 

He’d been planning to look presentable all day, but somehow his tie had loosened itself before he even got to the bottom of the stairs. Hastily, he tightened the knot again and re-tucked the end of the tie into his sweater, then shrugged into his sport coat. 

“Everybody ready?” 

The question proved to be a purely rhetorical one. Leslie was the only person even remotely dressed, bundled up in a bright red wool coat. Her hair tumbled attractively from under a dark knit cap. 

Stephanie, still in pajamas and bathrobe, shook her head. “You two go to City Hall. We—” she shot a glance at April, who was kneeling on the floor with the dog—“are going to call the animal shelter to see if anyone’s reported a three-legged dog missing—”

“They haven’t,” said April.

“And then we’re going to buy dog stuff!” 

Ben jumped back slightly. He hadn’t even seen Andy, who was also on the floor with the dog, but sitting under the kitchen table, and therefore the tablecloth, for whatever reason. Atop the table were the remains of a dozen doughnuts and a half-dozen eclairs. In retrospect, he wondered what he’d been thinking when he bought them. 

“Which we cannot afford at this moment,” Andy continued. “But Ludgate here says it’s bad for dogs to eat people food all the time.” 

“Shots,” said Stephanie. “You are also going to get him shots. And have him checked for a microchip. _If_ he doesn’t belong to someone already.” 

“We can’t afford any of that,” April said, “because we’re broke, because we’re not getting paid, because we’re supposed to be at work right now but instead we’re in Minnesota.” 

Leslie stood up, ignoring April entirely (odd, Ben thought, given that it was the first time he’d ever heard April express any sort of desire to maybe be at work). 

“So it’s just you and me this morning,” she told him. 

Stephanie handed Ben a travel mug, which he accepted. “Knock ‘em dead, big brother.” 

“All we’re doing right now is touring City Hall.” Despite Cindy’s insinuations, he knew it quite well, in fact. Or he had at one point. One, it wasn’t very big, and two, he’d spent a lot of time wandering its corridors while attempting to evade angry City Council members. 

Stephanie caught his eye over Leslie’s head, glanced down at the knit cap and blonde curls, and raised her eyebrows. “Knock ‘em dead anyway.” 

He nodded. 

Leslie remained silent on their drive to City Hall, though Ben would have sworn he could hear her thinking. She seemed to be thinking harder and harder as they approached their destination. It didn’t take long to get there, but by the time he pulled into an empty parking spot in the visitor’s lot, he’d given himself a slight headache, trying to figure out what she was thinking. 

It occurred to him, perhaps somewhat belatedly, that he could have just asked. 

“So this is it?” Leslie pressed her nose to the passenger side window. “It’s nicer than I expected.” 

“It’s not bad.” 

Leslie climbed out of the car, phone clutched in one bare hand. “The front steps are good. Let’s go.” 

“Good for what? Leslie, what are you--” 

“Pictures,” she said. “If we were really dating, I would take pictures of everything. So I’m going to. I’m just…” 

He followed Leslie’s gaze and found it resting on his left arm. “You’re going to follow your instincts.” 

“Exactly,” she said, breaking into a small smile, which Ben decided he’d take. “So go pose on the steps. Like you did in your inauguration photo.” 

“How do you know what--” He shook his head. “You did research on me.” When? When she’d first figured out who he was? Probably. Maybe she remembered from high school. Maybe Stephanie had a photo album he wasn’t aware of. Anyway, it didn’t matter. 

“Go stand on the steps,” Leslie insisted. She shooed him with her bare hand, now turning pale in the cold. “One with just you, and then I join you and we do a selfie.” 

“Is it a selfie if two people are in it?” 

“Shut up and look happy.” She waved him into position. 

Ben shuffled to his right a little bit, following her gesture, then took a deep breath. _Leslie’s my girlfriend today_ , he told himself. _She wanted to be my girlfriend today._

“Perfect.” A moment later, she was beside him, holding her phone above her head. “Okay. We have to hurry with this one. My hand’s getting cold.” 

The faux shutter snapped. Leslie handed him the phone while she dove in her pocket for gloves, which she didn’t bother to put on right away. 

“How’s it look?” 

It probably didn’t matter, since they were taking pictures for the gesture and not the pictures themselves, but...Ben texted the photo to his own phone anyway. 

“Good,” he told her, handing the phone back. “I think it’s convincing.” 

Leslie studied the screen for a moment, bit her lip, then shut the display off and shoved the phone into her purse. 

“Convincing is good. That’s what we’re going for--wait, what are you doing?” 

Ben stared at his own hand, also ungloved, which hovered uncertainly between them. 

“Following my instincts.” His breath had caught in his chest a little bit. That was normal, right? “Is this not a good instinct?” 

“No. Nope. Great instinct. That’s convincing. I like holding hands.” 

“Well then.” He watched Leslie slide her fingers against his. “Okay, your hand is like a block of ice.” Probably, he thought, he should’ve just let her put her gloves back on. Then again, how was he supposed to fake a convincing relationship with someone if he didn’t know how _this_ felt? 

It was a shaky justification, at best. But now he knew. Aside from being freezing, Leslie’s hand was tiny, her skin soft, her grip firm. 

“Ready?” she asked. 

He locked his eyes on hers, and nodded. “Ready.” Together, they finished climbing the steps. 

Just before Leslie pushed City Hall’s front door open, she nudged him in the ribs and said, “Teamwork.” 

“Teamwork,” Ben echoed. 

His word got lost--not in the squeak of hinges, but in a cheery, welcoming chorus of “Ice Clown!”

**Author's Note:**

> This has been a WIP for some time, and I'm hoping that cross-posting it here from LJ will encourage me to get back to work on it.


End file.
